Thoughtful Fridays

I have been reading a book by Ethan Hubbard, entitled Grandfathers Gift: A Journey to the Heart of the World. It is a powerful book, filled with simple vignettes and essays that provide a poignant and often eloquent window opening onto the lives of ordinary individuals the world over. I read each persons story with the reverence of a prayer and the sweetness of a caress. When I was very young, I determined that I would travel, see the world and its many ways of living. Not for some grandiose purpose(I was probably seven when I first became impassioned by the idea), but because somewhere embedded deep in my soul, I felt that if I were to travel, to see the faces of the multitudes, to experience their lives, to walk on their path, however briefly... then compassion would reveal itself to me in all its splendor. Not compassion born of gratitude for the many blessings in my life, but rather compassion that evolves when the boundary between "self" and "other" blurs. When the "reality" of my upbringing, no longer holds sway and the vision of "MY TRUTH" waivers before the luminosity of life itself. I remember a quote I read years ago when I was tipping my years toward the teens, "Belief is the greatest impediment to true knowing". It was this notion that cemented my desire to travel.
I didn't though.
I could easily dismiss this by enumerating a thousand things, great and small, that made staying seem necessary, even inevitable...but that wouldn't be honest. When I really look at myself and my relationship to my life, I realize that I've become tame. Tame in that I am comfortable with the reality I live in...with its warm bed and reliable meals, with its softness and convenience, with its numbing predictability and fearful security. Believe me, I am appalled to admit this. I haven't traveled as my young self assured me I would, in large part because it frightened me... the unknowns, the dangers, the lack of this or that.
But reading this book, is like hearing her voice, determined and resilient ...beckoning.

Comments

Coraggio

When everything looks bleak and the darkness cramps against the cold, it takes courage to simply look out from imagined isolation toward the wide horizon of beauty available in every moment. It takes courage to lean into the sea of life and trust the tide. When weary limbs no longer support us, it takes courage to trust our inner buoyancy and float. It takes courage, in the face of darkness, to remember the light and sit in all our apparent blindness and listen, silently, to the still, small whisper within. It takes courage, in that dark hour, when nothing else remains. Eyes closed. Eyes opened. A glimpse, a memory, a fleeting vision of a light so bright it blurs the borders of things seen and things perceived into a comprehensive wholeness of being. It takes courage.

tree digging

Yes, I know it doesn't look like much. It was only about 5 inches in diameter and 8 feet tall. The root ball was no more than 3 feet deep. But it was a sweet red-bud tree that we planted the year Bodhi was born, his placenta was buried in it's roots and like many of the trees in our neighborhood, it died (see this post to understand why) . I can't say that I mourned its death in a tangible way, rather it produced in me a sort of unnameable melancholy. I am a woman who loves the spring. I nearly live for it. When the first signs of life emerge like a haze of hope, I drink in green with the passion of a desert crawling woman sipping at an oasis. I gorge. This year has been hard. Our neighborhood isn't leafing out in native splendor, instead the tired trees seem to begrudge the effort, only offering a tender shoot or bud occasionally. The north side of many trees appear to have given up all together, too tired after a long winter...

grief

Grief is defined as a deep or intense sorrow. I have been thinking a lot about grief, about it's wide and sticky reach, about the watery quality of it's absorption and the agonizing effort of swimming to shore. Intense sorrow happens. It is a part of life. Yet we press against it. We try to eradicate it. How? We encapsulate our grief in a story, thus effectively removing us from the immediacy of the pain. The mind promises salvation and begins to tell a story, over and over and over. We listen to the inner ramblings, the constant diatribe, the neurotic attempt to avoid the experience. When someone is hurting we listen to their story, we talk about it, we recount our own story, but we certainly don't jump in the waters of sadness, instead we sit on the bank of our familiar longing. Once, when I was floundering in deep grief, my youngest brother knelt next to me and held me for over an hour. He didn't speak. He didn't commiserate. He just jumped in the ...

angelbirdflies

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